A teenager has travelled hundreds of miles in a desperate attempt to save hedgehogs from a mass cull.

Christopher Black, 17, from Worthing, is the youngest of five volunteers trying to save thousands of hedgehogs in the Outer Hebrides.

The animals have been targeted in a £90,000 extermination programme to protect rare wader birds.

Mr Black said: "This is the unnecessary killing of healthy animals and I'm dead against it.

"Getting up in the morning is probably the hardest thing for me to do, the rest of the day just involves going out there and trying to catch the hedgehogs.

"There is not much in the way of entertainment on these islands but this is a challenge for me.

"My mates are really supportive of what I'm trying to do and I hope to get some of them involved as well although they don't know it yet."

Hedgehogs are not native to the Western Isles and were introduced to the island in the mid-Seventies to help control garden pests. Their numbers have since rocketed to 5,000.

The extermination by Scottish National Heritage (SNH) began last night in North Uist, in the Western Isles, despite last-minute pleas for a reprieve for the animals.

SNH believes the cull is necessary to save rare birds, like lapwings, snipes and redshanks, whose numbers have halved in the past 10 years as a result of hedgehogs eating their eggs.

The Uist Waders Project, heading the cull, said it was prepared to hand over any animals it captured for transport to the mainland but only as part of a scientific trial with full monitoring.

The project said talks with hedgehog groups had broken down as they were presented with proposals which fell short.

Hedgehog-hunters, using sniffer dogs to find the animals' dens, will kill any they find by injecting them with poison.

The first phase of the operation, continuing today, will involve eradicating an estimated 200 hedgehogs in 30sqkm of land.

The cull is expected to take several years to complete.

Codenamed Operation Tiggywinkle, after Beatrix Potter's famous character, efforts to save the hedgehogs have so far led to the rescue of19 hedgehogs.

Ten of those were handed in by islanders, who had been offered a £5 reward for every creature found alive and taken to the collection point.